U.S. missile defense plans in Europe could set off a new arms race, an advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday,according to the UPI news agency.

Gleb Pavlovsky, an influential political adviser to the Russian president, warned that the U.S. drive to deploy ballistic missile defense, or BMD assets in Poland and the Czech Republic could mean that the Bush administration was targeting Russia, as it had done during the Cold War.

“This surely is the beginning of an arms race in some sense,” Pavlovsky said. “Which is all the more unjustified given that Russia has never, not on a single issue, expressed an intention to confront the U.S. or to deter it.”

According to Pavlovsky, another sign of Washington’s increasingly hostile policies vis-a-vis Moscow is Freedom House’s latest Freedom in the World survey, in which the U.S. government-funded advocacy group placed Russia in the ’not free’ category, alongside North Korea, Cuba and Libya, countries where the U.S. is waging or considering military action.

“We should be aware that Russia has been placed in the group of targeted nations,” Pavlovsky said according to the report.